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Time to give him a black wash. I actually have several black washes but for some reason I never use them. Maybe I should start, but for now I just mix my own. There might have been a reason for it that I have long since forgotten. In any case, I took a drop of Coat D'Arms black and made a very thin 5:1 ratio wash out of it using Frontline Games capillarity agent. This will help it flow into crevices more than stain the surface. I want a little staining for an aged look, hence my ratio, but I don't want too much.

I painted the broccoli base next. I took pictures of it but they don't really show anything. Basically I took some Reaper pro paint Shield Brown, Troll Flesh, and Sage thinned about 2:1 water to paint and then layered a random pattern. I mixed them together, added a little Buckskin here and there, and tried to get a look of dead land - like he withers things wherever he walks. It turned out okay, but doesn't really show in the pictures.

Fortunately what does show in the pictures is my metal layering. So for the first layer I took whatever the basic element was (so my bronze mix, straight pro paint pewter, straight pro paint dragon gold) and thinned it about 8:1 with capillarity agent. The capillarity agent (and also Reaper wash medium) help keep thinned metallics from separating into metal flakes and constituent colours. By thinning the metallic with these you can layer with them much as you would any paint. So after the first layer of metallics I got this:

The next step was to slowly add more pro paint pewter to the mixes. This is where the ultra thinned ratio came into play. Using that I added one small drop of pewter and did a layer. Then added another drop and did it again. I repeated this until it looked right, slowly layering into a smaller area each time to make a highlight transition. Silvery metallics can act as "white" to lighten other metallics, pewter can do the same it's just a more dull kind of silver - good for aged metal. By adding pewter to the existing mix bit by bit I'm also slowly adjusting the ration of thinner to metallic towards more metallic paint - thus giving each new layer a lighter, brighter shine.

This is the first time I tried this, but it seems to have work out quite nicely:

Finally I began to add Reaper master series Pearl White into the mixes instead of pewter. Pearl White is a satiny white so it doesn't dull the metallics when added. This let me get an extra layer of bright highlight into the metal, like so:

That turned out pretty neat! It could use maybe a bit of refinement, but it did pretty much what I expected so I'll use it again on my next metallic job (probably Baran Blacktree). It's something new and fun to play around with in any case.

So next I decided to highlight his cloak. When I did my blackwash I also did it over the aged red brick of his cloak. This is not something I would generally do, but I wanted it extra grimey. So for my first highlight over this I chose Reaper pro paint blood red and thinned it about 4:1 water to paint:

Next I took some pro paint firehawk and added it to the blood red. I wanted a bit lighter and more vibrant red but not all the way as bright red-orange as firehawk tend to go. So it was probably 50/50 of each, maybe a touch more towards firehawk. I did it by eye until it looked about right. Then I added some more water to correct back to the right thinned ratio and put it on:

It's not dramatic, but it works. It's difficult to highlight red and keep it grimey, so I figured this was probably good to go and more messing with it would just risk ruining it.

So the next thing I was touch up his boney bits and horns with Reaper master series Bone Shadow:

And then using the rest of the triad, Aged Bone and Polished Bone, finished those off. Nothing special here, just using the triad and layering with thinned paint:

During all of this, I didn't forget about his shield arm. Which was nice, because sometimes I get so caught up in part of a figure that I do forget to paint separate bits:

The inside of the shield done, time to put it in place!

Or not, because I ran into a problem - it doesn't fit right! My plan to pin it in failed. I mean it kinda looks okay from the front...

But from the back, it's clear this guy has something weird going on:

So I pulled it off, trimmed and filed the pin down, and then set about using my x-acto knife to pull out all the greenstuff I'd jammed into his armpit and widen out the hole for the arm to fit. I should have just done this in the beginning instead of trying to be clever, I didn't consider that my plan added 2mm length to his arm. I was in such a panic trying to do this without damaging my painted work that I forgot to take pics.

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I didn't mean to miss a day but daylight savings time caused my soul to leave my body.

So the next thing I decided to tackle was the armour. I'd already basecoated with MSP Nightmare Black because blue gives a nice look under silver metallic. So on top of that, I put a coat of MSP Durasheet Alloy - it's a discontinued Heavy Gear paint, but any medium silver will do.

You can see some of the Nightmare Black peaking through. You may have noticed that when I know I'm going to be doing more to an area, I don't bother with trying to get a solidly opaque coat and this is no exception. One coat and I'm calling it good.

You'll also notice that I'm painting almost all of the metal on him the same colour. I think it would look really nice to break up the metals on him into two different colours, however, I wanted to make him rusty (REALLY rusty) and I was super excited about trying out the Secret Weapon paints for what they're marketed for. Obviously I've said before that paint is paint and you should go beyond the label and use the colours for what they are, but that doesn't mean that going with the label is a bad thing to do. So while I've been very much enjoying these paints for other uses, I've been really looking forward to using them for rust and as you'll see, they do not disappoint.

So I started with Secret Weapon Rust Shadow pretty much all over. And you guys know that I've been singing this particular paint's praises for a while now and I'm going to do it some more

Because oh my gosh, if I were wanting to do a TMM (True Metallic Metal) on this armour, Rust Shadow would be a fantastic paint to use for shading. I am absolutely in love with Secret Weapon's Rust Shadow.

So what I'm doing with the rust effect is I'm going to layer up in the same way that I would if I were going about it with smooth blending - with each paint, I'm going to cover it over a smaller and smaller area. The difference here is that I'm really just going all over with this rust technique. It is not necessarily going to be technically correct when it comes to lighting. I'll decide later if I want to put more time into trying to correct the lighting or if I'm happy with the overall look without it being closer to technically correct.

Next up was SW Old Rust, which is a purpley maroon colour.

I think this paint will also come in handy for TMM for the deepest shadows.

Next up was SW Brown Rust and, spoiler alert, this is when it's really going to start looking like rust. I should mention, I was using a crappy brush for all of this because the technique I was using is scumbling - which is just a funny sounding word for mashing paint onto an area so that it leaves a random smooshy blob that isn't too opaque. You don't want to have a ton of paint on your brush for this, but you don't want to remove as much paint as you do when drybrushing.

I looked at a few pictures of rusty armour to get an idea of how I wanted to place the rust, but I pretty much just decided that "everywhere" was what I was going for. The only parts that I was very intentional with were the sword and the hole over the stomach. It's probably pretty difficult to tell in pictures, but the stomach area of Rictus' armour is missing, so you can see his spine. It's such a neat detail of the sculpt. So I decided that the rim of that area needed to have a lot of rust to show that it was eaten away. I decided that Rictus here was laying face down in a ditch for quite some time before some jolly Necromancer came along and resurrected him. Also on the sword, I read one time that rust would be most prominent on the blade toward the hilt.....or perhaps it was that the rust would be knocked off toward the tip due to use. I don't know. Something like that. But anyway, I focused a lot of rust there and also on the areas of the sword where there was obvious damage to the blade because rust maybe eats away at nicks like that.....maybe? I'm not really sure, but looks good to me.

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I wanted my Rictus to have an old look to his armor, but I had to think about it some. I decided the best way to proceed would be to make it look like aged bronze. Rictus might be 100 years old, or 1000. I figured an overall bronze look might make him look more like he came from a different era.

So to do some really old looking bronze, I chose old reaper pro paints Pewter, Copper, and Chestnut Brown here:

I stirred those together and added a few drops of Reaper brown liner to tone the mix down a bit. I didn't go as dark as I usually would for a basecoat because I'm going to be using a black wash here and there anyway. When I go to do that I can either do it very precisely in just the crannies, or an all over wash. I'll figure that out by feel when I get there.

I put it on and immediately liked the result. It's a pretty good look for him. At this point I'd like to say that even though Rictus looks like he ought to be pretty fiddly, it turned out that he was pretty easy to paint. This is mostly a workflow thing, he's sculpted with easy transitions between parts so you don't wind up having to do a lot of retouch because you hit stay spots. He's a very painter-friendly piece.

Then I decided to paint his base broccoli. I mixed some old reaper pro paint shield brown with some old pro paint sage and then threw a lot of brown liner in. I just need it to look sort of earthy. I also painted the shade colour of his reds, in this case old pro paint aged red brick:

That done, I mixed some pewter up with some brown liner for his sword blade and scalemail bits, and did the hilt and pommel of his sword the same way using old pro paint dragon gold. The bits of cloth he has hanging off his sword arm and around his midsection I did with coat d'arms Hairy Brown darkened with brown liner. His boney bits and horns got Reaper Master Series Bone Shadow.

That finishes most of his baescoats so the next stage I can start using a black wash.

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@Guindylooi think I need a tetanus booster just looking at your pictures...

And now I need to buy some secret weapon paint..

I kind of feel the same, doubly so with the whole secret weapon paint purchase... So hurry up and get here spring! Oh, and if Mastercard wants to help out too, I won't complain :p I've wanted their wave one paints for a while now - ever since I found out about them, actually...

1 hour ago, Pezler the Polychromatic said:

Looking for Secret Weapon paints? I know a guy.

I suspect several of us know a specific guy, maybe even the same guy. But the question is, do I go through your guy, or dare I deal.... Directly with the devil, I mean website? :p (I'd deal with Meeple, but they're out of sooo many of them)

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So continuing on from my last work post and my emergency fix of his arm, so as to make him look less mutated, there wasn't a whole lot left to do on him except his shield. And minor touch-up where my fix mangled a bit here and there.

So the shield metallics were done the same as his armor and sword. Same three basic colours: bronze mix, pewter, dragon gold. I chose pewter for the outside rim to match the pewter I'd done on the back. This is a useful trick for shields so you don't have to mess about with a transition zone between unlike metallics front-to-back. If there's a sculpted transition or clear boundary I might exploit it, but if not I usually make the rim of the decorative front match the rear of the shield. The center portion with all the squiggly texture got bronze, and the ring around the boss got dragon gold. I should also note that part of choosing to do the outside rim of the shield in pewter was to help balance out all the bronze on his armor and make a clearly visible distinction at a distance between his armor plates and the shield.

So since from there it was just blackwash and layering again, here's the first stage:

Second, shinier stage:

And shiniest stage, which I decided was shiny enough. It's not quite as many layers as the armor, but the shield overall catches a lot more light. Remember that painting is not an exact science, so you should always feel free to modify your method to make things look more "right" than to just repeat steps. You can see in the following pic that even taking off a highlight step the shield looks much brighter than the armor, even though both were done the same way:

That done, I decided to do the round center boss as a gem. Truthfully I'd usually do it as metal, but I didn't just want to make it gold since there's such a nice deep ring between the outside and inside. Having already used my staples of copperish, silverish, and goldish I couldn't think of a good different metallic that would look right except an off-colour like red steel, green steel, etc. I figured if I was going to go through all that trouble for it then I might as well just make it a gem.

There are many great tutorials for painting gems out there, this is just my low-effort "close enough" quick way. It generally works out okay on smaller gems, but for larger ones (or for a more convincing effect) you may want to look up a proper tutorial.

So first I took a medium purple, in this case Reaper old pro paint Imperial Purple, and darkened it with coat d'arms black. Note that usually I darkend with brown liner, but I chose black because it would give a deeper looking shadow.

From there I thinned my imperial purple about 5 drops of water to one drop of paint and began highlighting just the lower part. Once that built up a bit I started adding some dragon white to it in small quantities. Each time I added a drop of white I also added a drop of water to keep the mix thin. Once I felt it looked bright enough then I simply added a white dot in the dark purple portion to simulate light reflection. This all sounds like a bit of work, but because the working area was so tiny it only took about 5 minutes. Layering is pretty quick with small bits. This is also why sometimes you'll notice my pouches or leather straps wind up with more pop to them than swaths of cloth, it's just easier and quicker to bring them up to a nice highlight. (I'm quite lazy)

And with that, Mr. Rictus is finished and ready to join the many Reaper skeletons on my shelf as their new leader. I have a lot of skeletons, a ridiculous amount of skeletons. I think it's because they're easy and fun. Some day a whole bookcase will just be skeletons for no reason.

Rictus was an absolute treat to work on, even with doing the arm the stupid way. If you missed him as a freebie, he's definitely worth a buy - an instant classic that's fun to paint. If you paint your own Rictus, tag me in your post with @buglips*the*goblin so I don't miss it and I can see what you did with him! Have fun! I look forward to seeing all the neat versions of him!

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And I have just realized that I’m painting his thighs like cloth but you and Michael Proctor both painted them as metal.........which makes a lot more sense since he’s wearing a full set of armour.... oh well, my Rictus is like “I don’t need to protect my thighs, YOLO”

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I think it’s because he definitely has cloth on his arms so my brain reasoned that he’s thighs must be cloth as well? I don’t know. Fortunately the rust effects will be super simple to do again....which is a good thing anyway since I’m not saying I forgot about his shield arm.....but I kinda sorta totally forgot about his shield arm.

“Off to off the wizard”
The figures are from Reaper Bones KS3, “Chronoscope Wild West Oz”. Since they all were armed, I see this as a sort of hit squad, hence the title.
I based them on 30mm round display bases from Reaper, and I 3d Printed a 20mm round in a similar style for Toto.
Since not only the Tin Man, but also the flying monkey are obvious metal robots, I think “Weird West Oz” or even “Steampunk Oz” would be a more fitting moniker.

The miniatures are made in the slightly harder Bonesium, henceforth to be known as Better Bones™. Since the third Bones kickstarter, all Chronoscope Bones are coloured grey,
The Flying Monkey, Lion, Tin Man and Scarecrow are sculpted by Bob Ridolfi, with Dorothy and Toto by Julie Guthrie. Only the Scarecrow seems to be released in Bones as of yet.